UTS blows whistle on lottery scam

POSTED: 09/29/11 2:02 PM

St. Maarten – United Telecommunications Service has warned its customers about an ongoing lottery scam. The company’s Marketing and Communications Officer Ivy Lambert said Wednesday that several customers alerted them to the scam and they decided to issue a general warning.

The scam begins with people being called from the United Kingdom and informed that they have won a large sum of money in a foreign lottery. They are then contacted again and requested to send a substantial cash deposit so that they may collect their winnings.

“This type of scam has been going on for many years using the postal system and eventually email was used as a new medium to mislead the victims. Now these con-artists have graduated to a new means of communicating with their targets and have started using the telephone system,” UTS Marketing and Communications Officer Ivy Lambert said.

“Unfortunately, we have had some customers who have been contacted in an attempt to mislead them. Luckily they were aware what was going on and brought these attempts to our attention. This is a world-wide phenomenon and is not only limited to our island or our UTS phone systems. By making this announcement, we want to do what we can to create awareness of this problem to avoid anyone falling victim to this kind of trickery,” Lambert added.